In over four millennia of migrations and settlements, Bantu-speaking Central Africans developed complex forms of political and religious leadership.Footnote 1 Outsiders employed vague and sometimes pejorative terms to describe forms of leadership unfamiliar to them: despots, chiefs, priests, prophets, kings, witchdoctors, sultans, etc. With the emergence of anthropology as a modern social science, European intellectuals formalized this folk vocabulary in descriptions of supposedly universal political and religious institutions. ‘Divine kingship’, one such institution, signified beliefs in the power over visible and invisible worlds that were contained in the body of a man and his descendants. Theories of divine kingship helped to make ‘kingship’ a key aspect of Central African historiography. Typified by Jan Vansina's Kingdoms of the Savanna, such understandings of kingship first emerged in the intellectual world of colonial indirect rule, reached a historiographic climax in the 1960s, and continued to have ongoing ramifications in the post-independence era.Footnote 2 In addition to influencing ideas of kingship in historical discourse, divine kingship theory placed such ideas within an evolutionary schema of political and religious change.
The theory of divine kingship addressed the succession of a ruler: how sovereignty outlived its bodily incarnation. In European political thought the intellectual origin of disembodied sovereignty was the medieval idea of the king's two bodies, the mortal body of the king and the immortal body politic.Footnote 3 In most African polities, disembodied sovereignty involved the oral articulation of authority over people, not texts over territory.Footnote 4 Narratives and rituals incarnated the dead in their living descendants, leading to networks of authority surrounding the holders of titles. Anthropologists termed this titular form of sovereignty, ‘positional succession’, and in some cases, such as for Lunda-related polities, ‘perpetual kinship’, in which those who assumed titles inherited the ensemble of kin-defined political relationships.Footnote 5 Since multiple living and dead bodies occupied a title, the dead were not far removed from the living. Even the physical remains of the dead were the site of power and potential perversion. The ties between living and dead kin, fictive and real, formed the principal formations around which rituals and myths of power gathered. Scholars would take these rituals and myths of titled sovereignties as proof of divine kingship.
For Africanists, proving divine kingship became a way to discuss the spatial and temporal forms of African polities. Spatially, the idea of divine kingship transformed certain titles into kings of peoples (or ‘tribes’) who resided in specific territories. Temporally, divine kingship was thought to exist somewhere in between the primal and the modern, a development on the road to a universal processes of secularization that involved political centralization and religious diversification. An Africanist historiography was thereby fashioned out of a supposedly universal history. The terminal point of this historical teleology in the African case was the divorce of the divine from the king, rooting secular politics in states and spiritual politics in movements. Exploring the application of this particular vocabulary of politics and belief thus exposes how time and space came to be organized in the historiography of African sovereignties.
Ideas of divine kingship engaged with colonial and postcolonial politics. During colonialism, by harnessing people to the chiefs of ‘tribes’, divine kingship theory became part of the Janus-faced civilizing mission of an indirect rule that employed tradition to modernize through a progression from spiritual to secular sovereigns. Anthropologists drew on the observed or rumored rituals of indirect rulers to argue for spiritual kingships, which, modernizers hoped, would form a basis for a secular administration. When, during decolonization, African prophet-intellectuals challenged indirect rulers as well as the separation of sovereignties into secular states and religious movements, divine kingship theory once again helped scholars make sense of these changes by emphasizing the contested nature and historical dynamism of kingship. After colonialism, as historians drew on vernacular myths to establish a golden age of kings, ideas of divine kingship contributed to a politics of nostalgia that searched for uncorrupted forms of African power. Through the twentieth century, thus, the historiographic (re)fetishization of bodies of male rulers, as Florence Bernault would put it, was entwined with governance and popular politics.Footnote 6
DIAGNOSTIC RITUALS OF COLONIAL-ERA ANTHROPOLOGISTS
The particular application of divine kingship is examined here through Africanist writings about the Central African Bemba chieftainship titled the ‘Chitimukulu’.Footnote 7
By the late nineteenth century, when the British South Africa Company (BSAC) conquered the Central African region that became known as Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia), the Chitimukulu reigned over a polity, often referred to as a Bemba ‘kingdom’, but in fact a loosely affiliated confederation of competing matrilineages.Footnote 8 In the late 1890s, as the European presence advanced and raiding and trading activities were restricted, the Chitimukulu was challenged by a rival titleholder, the Mwamba.Footnote 9 In 1899, with the death of the Mwamba and the danger of the complete collapse of the Bemba polities, the BSAC administration affirmed the Chitimukulu as the ‘high priest’ of the Bemba nation, perhaps in recognition of the collapse of his secular powers over slave and ivory trades.Footnote 10 Through his adept negotiations with missionaries and colonial officials, the Chitimukulu further enhanced his position to become the Bemba ‘paramount’.Footnote 11
James G. Frazer's theory of religion, The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion disseminated through fields of classics and the social sciences at the same time as British colonialism gained a foothold across Bembaland and much of the African continent. In the first edition (1890), Frazer associated the wellbeing of the universe with a divine king's voluntarily or involuntarily control over agricultural fertility and human reproduction.Footnote 12 Such interests became part of the intellectual universe of European indirect rule, which stressed the ancient authority of tribal chiefs and their importance for local governance, precisely those individuals who best embodied divine kingship.Footnote 13 The example of Chitimukulu is hardly unique. The anthropological study of kingship in the Swaziland Protectorate during the interwar years is remarkably similar to that of Bembaland.Footnote 14 Similar histories could also be told of Buganda in British East Africa, with their early colonial interpreter, missionary John Roscoe, a frequent correspondent of Frazer, of British-ruled Nigeria, with its intellectual history of divine kingship related to Yoruba kingdoms and kingly (oba) authority during indirect rule, as well as R. S. Rattray's evolutionist histories of the Asante.Footnote 15 Yet the idea of divine kingship had an autonomous intellectual history that did not simply address colonial needs. To appreciate this intellectual history, the dissemination of certain aspects of Frazer's theory needs to be considered.
Frazer's longtime academic home was his research fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge (1879–1941), a center for the application of classical knowledge to early twentieth-century social sciences. The new social sciences that engaged with British colonial politics and indirect rule flourished at the London School of Economics. Here, the doyen of British anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, praised Frazer's The Golden Bough as the ‘spirit of modern humanism – the union of classical scholarship with folklore and anthropology’. With a nod to the limitations of Frazer's armchair ethnography, he suggested The Golden Bough should be ‘in the kitbag of every ethnographic explorer’.Footnote 16 Malinowski's colleague and one-time teacher, Charles G. Seligman, also used Frazer's ideas, first in his study of the Shilluk of Sudan, and then to hypothesize that a ‘Hamitic’ race disseminated its civilization, essentially divine kingship, from Egypt to ‘Negro’ Africa.Footnote 17 From academic papers to museum displays, early twentieth-century anthropology publicized divine kingship as a stage in the development of statehood. African kingship entered into the teleology of world history.Footnote 18
The emergence of anthropology as a fieldwork discipline was especially important for the dissemination of divine kingship theory. In the third edition, published in 1911, Frazer expanded on divine kingship by showing how it was articulated in global myths and enacted through similar rituals, the most important being the killing of the king when he became old and infirm. The ritual of killing the king, according to Frazer, led to the continuity of divine kingship, and hence humanity in general. This ritual of regicide, it was postulated, formed a key component of political succession in ‘primitive’ politics. Seligman in his studies also emphasized regicide. By identifying rituals that signified divine kingship, in particular the killing of the king before death, The Golden Bough became an especially helpful tool in the ethnographer's kitbag. After all, Malinowski's students demanded observable practices that emerged directly from their fieldwork experiences rather than myths or reported knowledge. With such ‘diagnostic’ rituals, budding anthropologists could now establish what was (or was not) divine kingship.Footnote 19
From the 1920s, anthropologists grappled with Frazer's ideas and applied them to their fieldwork-derived data. They had already encountered missionary reports on magic and ritual. For example, for the Bemba, the Catholic White Fathers reported on magical items used to encourage agricultural growth, from body parts that were ever-replenishing, such as fingernails and mucus, to plants and animals that grew mysteriously, such as the fur of a badger when wounded and the bark of certain trees when moistened.Footnote 20 Anthropologists also began to observe or hear about many rituals that related specifically to the bodies of sovereigns. Those dealing with fraught times of disembodiment and bodily transformation – birth, reproduction, death, and burial – provided the most compelling evidence for divine kingship, in particular those rituals that helped the transition from life to death, including strangulation when a person was near death. They noticed that when a spirit became an ancestor, great care was taken to ensure that invisible forces did not harm people and disturb natural cycles. Burials also ensured that body and spirit remained content after death.Footnote 21 Graves had to be protected, for ambitious living individuals, who colonial authorities identified as belonging to ‘secret societies’, could dig up their bodies and employ them for magical ends with catastrophic consequences.Footnote 22
The focus on such rituals had methodological problems, however. Many rituals were rumored rather than observed, thus challenging the empirical methodology of fieldwork-based anthropology. Shunned by the colonial administration and missionaries, rituals, if they existed, were secretive, rarely witnessed, and frequently denied. Anthropologists had to decide whether rumored and rarely witnessed rituals were important in the political and religious life of the ‘tribes’ they studied.
Such methodological quandaries can be appreciated in the attempts of Audrey Richards, one of the most talented and influential students of Malinowski, to apply the concept of divine kingship in her analysis of the Chitimukulu of the Bemba. She had studied with Seligman and her notes indicate a familiarity with his lectures on divine kingship.Footnote 23 Completed just as she began her fieldwork among the Bemba, her first book, Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe developed some general reflections on the spiritual and material aspects of tribal chieftainship across Southern Africa.Footnote 24 Her fieldtrips (1930–1 and 1933–4) among the Bemba revealed many more specifics, but she still lacked precise data regarding the diagnostic rituals of divine kingship.Footnote 25 A colonial reformer who was rather taken with the Chitimukulu, Thomas Fox-Pitt, had written to Richards reporting that kings were strangled just prior to their death.Footnote 26 She thought that this ‘should be mentioned’ in her next book, that it would ‘please Slegs [presumably Seligman]’, and they could then ‘mark it out on their distribution maps as “killing of the divine chief”’.Footnote 27 In seeking out more definitive evidence, she corresponded with Godfrey Wilson, who she had met in Malinowski's seminars and who was then visiting the Bemba on her recommendation, following research on the Nyakyusa in the borderlands of Tanganyika and Nyasaland, and in preparation for his future research in urban Northern Rhodesia. At first, when she requested Wilson to make inquiries, he replied: ‘As for killing the divine chief, you don't half expect a lot!’Footnote 28 Following several weeks' effort and, as revealed in a number of letters, Wilson thought he found conclusive evidence that chiefs were strangled – or at least their last breath needed to be preserved in his body – to prevent their sickness spreading to the land.Footnote 29 Richards also received some information about strangulation by a colonial officer known for his ethnographic enquiries, W. Vernon Brelsford.Footnote 30 At this point, however, Richards still did not feel confident enough about the data, especially since one of Chitimukulu's burial officers and her principal research assistant, Paul Mushindo, contested the veracity of the ritual.Footnote 31 In fact, the neighboring Bisa had more convincing rituals of strangulation of chiefs prior to death, but the Bisa, with their less powerful political leaders, hardly seemed to fit into the model of divine kings.Footnote 32 The case of the Chitimukulu also did not fit the ritual criteria that Seligman had developed regarding divine kingship, in particular the king was not killed by a successor, and if regicide existed it appeared rather marginal to the sacred power of chieftainship.Footnote 33
Richards decided not to discuss divine kingship explicitly in her book, but indicated that she might write a separate article about it (which she did three decades later, as described below).Footnote 34 The book that she published in 1939, Land, Labour, and Diet in Northern Rhodesia, did however have a substantial section on the influence of royal ancestral spirits embodied in the living paramount, the Chitimukulu, on the welfare of the land and people, in particular through ceremonial rituals and sacred relics. ‘The performance of the ritual constantly emphasized the supernatural powers of the chief, both in his person and by his right of access to the tribal spirits’, Richards wrote. ‘On this deeply-seated belief in the attributes of their mfumu [chief or sovereign], economic incentives and the use of the land ultimately depended.’Footnote 35 These beliefs seem to have weakened in recent times, she went on to note, perhaps due to mission Christianity.
Part of Richards' problem was that she was trying to capture an arrangement between Bemba chiefs (mfumu), followers (abantu), territory (fyalo), and spirits (imipashi) that never had the stability implied by tribal descriptions. The colonial administration had systemized the post-conquest agreement between the Bemba lineage heads and the BSAC officials into a system of rotating chairs, whereby one chief would ‘move up’ the ranks until he eventually became the Chitimukulu, and would command authority over the other chiefs and draw a considerably higher salary from the Bemba Native Treasury.Footnote 36 While this arrangement was sufficient for the logistics of indirect rule as well as giving it a veneer of customary legitimacy, it contributed to succession disputes, often leaving contenders for titles and colonial administrators dissatisfied.Footnote 37 The effect that such contestation had on rituals of chieftaincy was double-edged. For some they provided legitimacy, while for those less satisfied, rituals were emptied of their powers and spiritual alternatives were needed.
The politics of the succession of colonial chieftaincies and the array of customary practices confronted by the colonial administration made the investigations of anthropologists in Richards' circle ever more relevant to colonial administration. Colonial-era anthropologists and administrators often did not agree: They were both interested in forms of change, which at this point was understood as an outcome of ‘culture contact’, the confrontation between agrarian-rooted indigenous cultures and a globally expansive Western modernity. They differed on its desirability, pace, and nature.Footnote 38 Placing the development of divine kingship in historical time was one way to theorize political change.
Richards' correspondent, Godfrey Wilson, the first director of the colonial-era Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, is best known for his pioneering study of change in an urbanizing African society while at the same time suggesting a conservative, that is a functionalist, view of rural Nyakyusa society and religion.Footnote 39 Yet his Nyakyusa research between 1934 and 1937 (where he was joined for twenty months by Monica Wilson (née Hunter) from 1935) actually pioneered an approach to changing forms of sovereignty, in particular the historical development of divine kingship. Among the Nyakyusa, Wilson claimed to find evidence of the suffocation of past kings by stuffing their nostrils and mouths, which captured their breath, and the removal of their growing parts, their hair and nails, which he thought were used to promote agricultural fertility.Footnote 40 He had also found such embodied rituals, albeit more remote and secretive, among the political leadership of the nearby Ngonde.Footnote 41 Comparison of the Nyakyusa and Ngonde rituals led him to a historical reflection on their supposedly divergent forms of power. He argued that the involvement of the Ngonde in the slave and ivory trade of the nineteenth century had promoted the secular aspects of their rule at the expense of the sacred. Among the Ngonde, he contended, power was organized both through mercantile relations and religious faith, hence the emergence of a ‘mercantile divinity’ over older forms of ‘agricultural divinity’, mirroring an argument that Frazer had already developed regarding the opposition between conquerors and autochthonous earth divinities.Footnote 42 For Wilson, Ngonde kings, the Kyungus, became political rulers enhanced by their secular mercantile powers, while the Nyakyusa, isolated from the slave and ivory trade, retained their sacred qualities and functions, in particular the promotion of agricultural fecundity. Through his comparative study, Wilson pioneered an Africanist interpretation of historical developments, that is a transition from sacred to secular kingship.Footnote 43 When such data and analysis engaged with the politics of decolonization a full-fledged temporal model of the rise and fall of divine kingship emerged.
DIVINE KINGSHIP BIFURCATED: SECULAR AND SACRED DURING DECOLONIZATION
By the 1940s, divine kingship had become an intellectual accompaniment to colonial chieftaincy. Drawing on Richards, colonial officer and ethnographer of the Bemba, W. Vernon Brelsford could claim, ‘There is little doubt that the ultimate authority over all the land in the tribe is vested in Paramount Chief Chitimukulu and this is based to a large extent upon the belief of the intimate physical and spiritual association of the chief and land.’ Such traditional authority was, according to Brelsford, a ‘common characteristic of Bantu political and religious thought’.Footnote 44 Secretive and rumored rituals of divine kingship, such as regicide to prevent the sickness of the paramount from afflicting the land, became, for Brelsford, fact for the Bemba and ‘common to many African tribes’.Footnote 45
Even as it was confirmed as colonial knowledge, this seemingly stable arrangement between paramount, people, land, and spirits was challenged. The attack on the mfumu's spiritual power came from competitors and allies. Religious prophets claimed spiritual power even as colonial modernizers preferred to emphasize a chief's secular authority. But with nationalist politicians seeking to take over the colonial state, the secular realm was no refuge for a chief's authority. The second spurt of interest in divine kingship occurred when prophets of God and of modernization challenged indirect rule.
Alice Lenshina gained a following in the area controlled by the Bemba chiefs. From 1953, when she had her first visions that revealed her prophetic gifts, through the formal declaration of independence (1964), Lenshina's authority jostled with other powers: missionaries, firstly, then the Bemba paramount, Chitimukulu and his subordinate chiefs, then colonial officials, and finally the nationalist movement at the moment that they were taking over the colonial state. Ultimately, the nationalists sent in troops to forcefully disperse the settlements of her followers. The conflict led to around 1,000 deaths, the arrest and imprisonment of Lenshina without trial (until her death in 1978), and the exile of her remaining 20,000 followers to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This violent history obscures the nature of Lenshina's movement in the 1950s: a joyous search for a Christian utopia through song and dance celebrated by the vast majority of Chitimukulu's subjects.Footnote 46
Colonial-era anthropologists, along with the colonial administrations, struggled to reconcile theory with changing indigenous structures of political and religious power. Colonial officials routinely interrogated Lenshina.Footnote 47 Then, in 1957, after an absence of more than two decades, Richards returned to Bemba country and interviewed her. Richards wanted to know how Lenshina had acquired her spiritual authority. Directly from God (Lesa), she replied. What is the difference between her Lumpa movement and the Bamuchape (the witchcraft cleansers of the 1930s), the anthropologist enquired? Lenshina replied that she works with God – and that her followers' salvation will be permanent: ‘If people return to their horns and magic, they will die.’ The Bamuchape, according to Lenshina, never had such power (that is, to permanently eradicate witchcraft and save people), and did not rely on the intervention of God.Footnote 48
These answers haunted an anthropological conception of indigenous spiritual power communicated by the ancestors and embodied in their living kin. Lenshina and her followers sought to shape notions of divine presence in this world: spiritual authority passed from the royal ancestors to God's agency. Lenshina proclaimed herself to be the embodiment of this spiritual authority. Her name was a vernacularized version of the ‘Queen’, ‘Regina’ (Lenshina). Her followers addressed her with the praise names of Bemba royals: ‘lubuto mulopwe’, of celestial lineage, or ‘lubuto lwa chalo’, the light of the world or perhaps ‘heaven on earth’.Footnote 49 For them, she also brought celestial power down to earth, ensuring agricultural and human fertility and fecundity. Choral song accompanied by bodily gestures inspired such spiritual power. Unlike Bemba chiefs, however, celestial power flowed from heaven and was not rooted to the bodily remains of the ancestors. In an incident telling to colonial officials, her movement desecrated the royal graves by cutting down the trees in the sacred grove.Footnote 50 Ancestors, spiritual anachronisms, had given way to God.
Lenshina was intervening in the nature of spiritual sovereignty. Even while Chitimukulu first welcomed Lenshina, she insisted on not giving obeisance to any ruler who claimed sacred power. Her most popular hymn, Tapali imfumu iyachila ine kano ine neka, ‘There is no chief above me; I alone am chief’, began to irritate the chiefs.Footnote 51 At the same time, especially when taken to task for lack of respect of political authorities, she informed the colonial administration that she did not ‘want to quarrel’ or have anything to do with ‘government’.Footnote 52 She did not cede power to them, however; her government was that of God's kingdom, not that of ordinary men and women. Lenshina was, one scholar noted, ‘an alternative to old and new state religions’.Footnote 53 Her ongoing defiance of the chiefs was a demonstration of the limits of their powers.Footnote 54
Colonial administrators also began to reconsider spiritual authority as a basis for state sovereignty. Unlike his ethnographic descriptions, Brelsford's Guide for District Officers (1944) focused on royal blood of bodies rather than their spiritual powers.Footnote 55 He argued that the guardian of the Chitimukulu's graveyard, Shimwalule, have his chieftainship revoked because he was ‘an undertaker and a priest rather than a chief’.Footnote 56 His 1948 lectures to chiefs were even more explicit: ‘People must have a spiritual life and many Chiefs [were] still powerful as spiritual leaders.’ But, Brelsford continued, ‘English culture will have nothing to do with witchcraft and magic … although the main body of natives still believe in witchcraft and magic – there are nowadays a few Africans who do not believe, and … the numbers will grow.’Footnote 57 The liberal colonial administrator, Thomas Fox-Pitt, who had first informed Richards of the strangling of the king, thought religious rituals rather unimportant, or important only to those who are invested in the rituals.Footnote 58 Progressive Africans, too, emphasized the secular powers of their chiefs, especially when colonial administrators were the audience.Footnote 59
Efforts to secularize chieftaincy never succeeded. By the 1960s, a disappointed Brelsford wrote a paper, ‘Some Reasons for African Backwardness and Resistance to Change’.Footnote 60 Chieftainship might not have carved out a secular realm of authority, as Brelsford hoped, but nationalists did establish a secular form of sovereignty. Kenneth D. Kaunda, the leader of the Zambian nationalist movement and the first and longtime president of Zambia (reigned 1964–91), grew up and had his first employment in the same mission community as Lenshina and in the country administered by one of the Chitimukulu's subordinates. Kaunda and his followers expressed the division between secular and spiritual sovereignty by ‘Kaunda Panshi, Lesa ku Mulu’, Kaunda on earth, God in heaven. Politicians ruled the affairs of this world; God ruled over heaven. For Kaunda a new morality, ‘Humanism’, influenced by a mixture of socialism and Protestant Christianity, governed this earthly realm. The new sovereign would deliver prosperity by encouraging all to work hard here on earth, eradicating evil forces such as greed, and relegating a spiritual realm to another place.Footnote 61
Such redefinitions of political and religious sovereignties ignited the interests of Africanist scholars in the historicity of realms of spiritual and political power. By this time socioeconomic change instead of tribal descriptions, or diachronic change rather than synchronic culture contact, was at the cutting edge of British Africanist anthropology, in part due to the influence of Monica and Godfrey Wilson.Footnote 62 Divine kingship could help anthropologists demonstrate how such sovereignties had changed with social structural features. In Monica Wilson's Frazer lecture of 1959 (subsequently published as Divine Kings and the Breath of Men), she proposed socioeconomic transformations rather than Seligman's cultural dissemination as the basis for the rise and fall of divine kingship. This entailed two historical moments. Firstly, divine kings became part of the political structure at some vague point, probably 400 years in the past and possibly linked to the spread of more advanced agricultural techniques or cattle rearing. Secondly, at a later date, materialist and secular political power spread. This second stage was drawn from Godfrey Wilson's argument regarding the emergence of ‘mercantile divinity’ among the Ngonde. Monica Wilson reiterated that the transition from what she termed ‘god to magistrate’ occurred sometime in the nineteenth century, and was linked to the spread of the slave and ivory trade.Footnote 63
Monica Wilson intended her historical argument to challenge ideas of timeless traditional authority, considered by progressive intellectuals to be a colonial myth of African society. Thus, according to Wilson, even while chiefs were a vital force at the center of Nyakyusa cosmology represented by a civilizing ancestor and subsequently contained in the body of each king, they were not an uncontested authority. The rule of the king had its counterpoint in the ‘breath of men’, a force for law and morality in the community that acted against living beings when the world was not how it should be.Footnote 64 Wilson was thus most interested in the political relationship between the king and his followers: the breath of men, the ordinary forms of witchcraft that limited the sovereignty of the divine king. Wilson wondered about those forces in postcolonial Africa that would check that of kings: “What concerns me most is to know what will replace the ‘breath of men’, and how a public conscience will operate …”.Footnote 65 In a secular state, for Wilson the outcome of an expanded scale in society, she posed the question of who or what would constrain sovereigns?Footnote 66 Wilson's emphasis was thus less on kingship than on the history (and future) of public voices and contestations. At a conference on myth organized by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in 1960 and presided over by Wilson, the analysis of colonial myths of timeless and unchallenged chieftainship were central. The summary of one paper read,
In the light of the facts … it is evident that in well over half of Northern Rhodesia, the Chief was not ‘high priest, supreme judge and final ruler’, but was subject to constitutional checks and balances. Furthermore, he was not beyond the reach of sorcery, shame or the moral sanctions applying to other members of the ‘tribe’ as the common myth of the prerogatives of the Chieftainship implies.Footnote 67
Audrey Richards seemed a little more persistent. In her 1968 article ‘Keeping the king divine’, she returned to divine kingship, albeit with greater attention to history. According to Richards, the Bemba Chitimukulu titleholder, Chitapankwa, with ‘cruel executioners’ who were distinct from his priestly ‘liturgical’ supporters, arose in the turmoil of the slave and ivory trade of the late nineteenth century. The powers accrued from mercantile trade allowed him to rid himself of agrarian-focused sacred priests.Footnote 68 Thus, even as she focused on kingship, the key issue Richards explored, like Monica Wilson, was the capacity of leaders to maintain legitimacy amidst changing configurations of political and religious sovereignty. She wrote that Chitimukulu's power rested on a ‘knife-edge’ of people's belief, a substantial reinterpretation of her previous views of people's ‘deeply-seated belief’, as she had described the basis of chiefly authority in Land, Labour and Diet in 1939.Footnote 69 According to Richards, her analysis emerged, when, in 1957, she witnessed the tension between the royal priests and Chitimukulu. This simplifies the range of struggles that she recorded in her research notes: the nationalists and the chiefs, the nationalists and Lenshina, the chiefs and Lenshina, the missionaries, the colonial administration, sometimes opposed and sometimes in alliance, all struggling to determine the basis of their authority in a postcolonial world.Footnote 70 Were these conflicts only a feature of the end of colonialism or characteristic of the deeper dynamics of Bemba history? Almost contemporary to Richards' article, Richard Werbner brought Richards' zero-sum configurations of sacred vs secular power into historical motion by arguing that the nineteenth-century polity was better described as federation with competing administrators than a centralized kingdom.Footnote 71
ORAL TRADITION AND HISTORICIZING KINGSHIP
Contemporaneous with the anthropological revisions in the 1960s, historians placed transformations in political and religious authority in deeper historical time. Their use of oral traditions instead of the supposedly observed rituals of colonial-era anthropologists led to new methodological quandaries. As they tried to render history from complex narratives, versions of uncontested kings and kingships appeared, comparable to the earlier interwar anthropological accounts.
Oral traditions were imperfect instruments of sovereignty that attempted to establish political legitimacy and mobilize alliances. Since legitimation involved claims over fertility and fecundity, narratives imbued men and women and their descendants with supernatural powers: rulers promised prosperity, and the stories of their origins, as told among their closest followers, confirmed their ability to deliver on such claims. Given positional succession and perpetual kinship, oral traditions became particularly telescoped and convoluted. Their characters not only brought together the living and dead under single titles but also inherited the dizzying array of their relationships. Mythic oral traditions, like rituals, were thus contested agglomerations of past performances, palimpsests in support of or in opposition to ruling bodies incorporated into single titles. They could be transcribed, however, into hegemonic histories.
Such issues can be appreciated by considering Jan Vansina's work. Although Vansina never dwelt on divine kingship specifically, the concept insinuated itself into his early work and had a profound influence on his periodization and representation of precolonial leadership. Vansina's initial scholarship on the Kuba was based on a nuanced reading of oral tradition influenced by his fieldwork in a flourishing realm of Belgian indirect rule during the 1950s, with data and analysis bent in the direction of the king. His first English-language publications on the Kuba contended that the coming of divine kingship marked a flowering of culture and politics:
Court etiquette was developed, and the king, from Shyaam onwards, was thought to be ‘the lieutenant of God on Earth’, a ruler by divine right. Most of the customs of divine kingship were adopted. The regalia, royal costume, and customs pertaining to kingship and lesser political offices were regulated in minute detail, and wars were waged against other Kuba chiefs who dared to adopt articles of the regalia considered to belong only to the king.Footnote 72
Vansina's Kuba divine kingship became generalized in his even more influential Kingdoms of the Savanna. Here, evidence of dominant and seemingly uncontested myths left the impression of a golden age of kings. The defining feature of these polities was a ruler: ‘Everywhere … not only was the ruler at the apex of the political structure but he was its prime mover’.Footnote 73 The Luba myth is at the core of Kingdoms: For Vansina, sometime between 1500 and 1700 Luba chiefs spread across South-Central Africa.
Kingship was based on the concept of bulopwe. This was a sacred quality, vested in the blood but transmissible only through males, which gave chiefs the right and the supernatural means to rule. Without bulopwe nobody could have authority and all bulopwe stemmed from Kongolo or Kalala Ilunga [the heroes of the Luba myth]. The king ruled, therefore, by divine right and was believed to have supernatural powers … The special quality of the ideology of kingship … was its strong connection with the ancestor cult and, even more, the connection between the bloodline and divine kingship …Footnote 74
This bold generalization, regarding divine right, periodization, the balopwe's gender, their absolute authority, and even their ancestral links to mythical characters, drew on the dynastic myths and the ruminations of colonial-era anthropologists. In seeking to establish the veracity of oral traditions as historical evidence, Kingdoms downplayed metaphor and tended to treat characters as individuals rather than as titles.
In less than a decade after its publication, Vansina recognized the limitations of major parts of Kingdoms. Footnote 75 This reflected the then new historical scholarship on the region, in particular on West Central Africa, based on more sophisticated interpretations of oral traditions by Vansina himself and by his students.Footnote 76 Nevertheless, Kingdoms had become a standard work that helped to mark out a periodization for Central Africa, an age of kings, prior to – or at least independent of the influences of – the slave trade. Thomas Reefe, who wrote the most influential English language work on the Luba ‘Empire’, claimed that in spite of Vansina's warnings to him regarding its dated nature, Kingdoms was ‘a take off point for many of my own ideas’.Footnote 77 His The Rainbow and the Kings: A History of the Luba Empire described the Luba epoch to have been an age of ‘sacral kings’.Footnote 78 Even if spiritual forces were questioned, as in Andrew Roberts's masterful history of the Bemba, kingship itself formed the lynchpin of precolonial politics. Roberts's History of the Bemba is thus a history of a Bemba kingdom.Footnote 79
Africanist historians also followed Vansina in viewing the end of divine kingship as an indigenous innovation in the face of external forces, in particular the slave trade. In Kingdoms, the slave trade was an ‘outside’ force, something imposed on these polities rather than being integral to them. Ultimately, according to Kingdoms, it led to the collapse of the kingdoms, and the rise of secular conquest states and trading networks.Footnote 80 Roberts, drawing on Richards, argued that Chitimukulu Chitapankwa, who most effectively integrated the Bemba kingdom into the slave and ivory trading networks, disavowed his sacred role and celebrated his secular one, as evidenced by his praise mukungula mfuba, ‘the one who sweeps away ancestral spirit-shrines’. (Sweeping away ancestral spirit shrines might have had less to do with the emergence of secular rule than fighting spiritually powerful competitors, however.)Footnote 81 Reefe had intrusive traders undermining Luba sacral kingship.Footnote 82 Trade supposedly eclipsed agriculture as a basis for political organization. The leader changed from the androgynous divine king who promoted fertility to the masculine conqueror who spread destruction.Footnote 83
The evidence for this sacred to secular transition was, however, always thin, even for the Bemba and the Ngonde-Nyakyusa, the original examples for this transition.Footnote 84 For the Bemba polities and others, nineteenth-century engagements with the slave and ivory trades probably contributed to the growth of competing dependencies, leading to geographically extensive conflicts and alliances, along with narratives about them.Footnote 85 For one of the ‘empires’ of the region, the Lunda, the notion of internally generated kingship followed by externally induced decline became suspect, even by Vansina.Footnote 86 In contrast to the claims of underdevelopment and dependency theory, the types of dependencies associated with regional and long distance trade were not external to this system of precolonial power but integral to it.Footnote 87 Mythic narratives probably reflected changing fictive kinships brought forward through perpetual kinship, in other words alliances and dependencies, rather than a golden age of Luba/Lunda kingdoms. The historiography, however, trucked in idealized depictions: sacred kings giving way to slave-trading warlords.
POLITICAL STATES, RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS, AND TRADITIONAL NOSTALGIA
The flipside of the alleged emergence of secular conquest states was how scholars came to view changing indigenous forms of sovereignty. With the decline of the sacred king, the movement appeared as explanation for supposedly anomalous, ‘religious’, forms of sovereignty. Religion, no longer linked to place and ruler, became something that moved. Yet present circumstances weighed heavily on such conceptions, for even as sovereignties bifurcated, political and religious realms overlapped, often leading to conflict. Religious prophets, like Alice Lenshina or Simon Kimbangu, laid down laws for their followers; nationalist prophets maintained supernatural and spiritual powers. Bodily gestures and performances remained key. Kaunda did so with his white handkerchief, the strumming of his guitar, and his tears for the sins of men. Mobutu Sese Seko, with his leopard skin hat and carved ebony walking stick, represented his descent from the heavens in the nightly television news, broadcast across a Zaire enthralled by Mobutuism.
The bifurcation in sovereignties, between politics and belief and between states and movements, was thus both apparent and real, with consequences for the organization of power and allegiances. The religious prophet inspired a movement; the nationalist prophet commanded a state. Yet overlapping and contested realms of sovereignty continued to trouble and inspire scholarship, from the influential article on religious movements by Willy de Craemer, Jan Vansina, and Renée C. Fox, first conceived out of a discussion of a ‘society-wide movement termed the Congo Rebellion’, to Paul Landau's history of a chief turned prophet.Footnote 88
The pure divine king, where spirituality still resided in a political sovereign, maintained a few scholarly admirers, in particular structural anthropologists who continued to analyze myth and ritual, uncorrupted, and outside of any historical transformation. In The Drunken King or The Origin of the State (orig. pub. 1972) and several additional books and articles, Luc de Heusch, drawing on both myth and ritual, claimed that the bodies of Central African kings were corps-fétiche, magical objects linked to fertility and fecundity.Footnote 89 In The Drunken King, De Heusch claims the myth of genesis of Chitimukulu, which tells of his death at the hands of his seductress, Chilimbulu and her husband Mwase, was ‘a great funerary hymn dedicated to the life of the cosmos’.Footnote 90
Divine kings offered the possibility of an alternative morality and spirituality. Pierre Petit, a Belgian anthropologist who studied with De Heusch, wrote of the ritual prescriptions that stem from the Luba myth and place the Luba king in contact with the spirits. The kings, for Petit, were, ‘A la fois homme et esprit, seul sur le seuil de l'au-delà, le mulopwe [king] est mieux placé que quiconque pour assurer à ses sujets les bienfaits du monde invisible.’Footnote 91 Nothing could be further than the image of modern Central African sovereigns. From starting out as colonial agents, divine kings became alternatives to postcolonial sovereignties, preserves of the spirituality and morality absent in political rulers.Footnote 92
Even British anthropologists were stricken by such nostalgic sentiments. In the early 1980s, in what must have been some of her final letters, Richards wrote to Edmond Leach and Jack Goody, in response to a lecture by Leach, expressing her desire to write about divine kingship.Footnote 93 She planned to write a book with a much younger anthropologist of India, Piers Vitebsky, on Bemba divine kingship, and had him order her notes in preparation for this task.Footnote 94 As the turmoil of decolonization gave way to the disappointments of independence, divine kingship came to represent an Africa free from the slave trade and modern colonialism. Divine kings now helped to evoke sentiments of recovered identities and the stability of an ossified history. Modernization turned from hope into affliction; precolonial history became nostalgia.
Theories of divine kingship became a helpful ideological lens for modern citizens who turned from morally and spiritually deficient politicians to traditional chiefs and religious prophets. In this regard Wyatt MacGaffey's observation is apposite: ‘[T]he used clothes of social science and indirect rule provide uniforms for revivals of the Kongo Kingdom and the Luba Empire.’Footnote 95 If divine kingships were the used clothes, the revivals were traditional ceremonies that enshrined chiefs as benevolent rulers who brought forth benefits from visible and invisible worlds of power.Footnote 96 Such traditional ceremonies performed a mosaic repertoire of royal rituals, in which the body of the paramount was celebrated through dance, often including his carefully choreographed dance of conquest. The Ukusefya Pa Ngwenya of the Chitimukuluship, named after the crocodile encountered by the ancestors of Chitimukulu, who belongs to the crocodile (ngwenya) clan, first pays homage to the Chitimukulu through several crowd-pleasing dances. Prominent Bemba rulers and politicians then deliver speeches. In 2000, for example, Chief Mwamba, the nineteenth-century competitor to Chitimukulu and the twentieth-century chief in line for the Chitimukuluship, announced ‘This is an important site where our ancestors first settled … it reminds us who we are and where we came from … Any Bemba who has not come to this site should consider himself a young boy.’ The future president of Zambia, then a government minister without portfolio, also a Bemba, the late Michael Sata, bolstered the authority of the living Chitimukulu by insisting that chiefs recognize his authority over succession. The national media agency broadcast the ceremony so that it formed one aspect of a nation sculpting the landscape of its past through its traditional royalty.Footnote 97
In addition to turning back time, traditional ceremonies invoke spatial dimensions. Bemba business leaders and politicians undertake pilgrimages to their traditional homes where they can pay respect, rest in the land of their ancestors, and re-root themselves. They form committees to fundraise and to organize the ceremony. The Internet publicizes the ceremony along with Bemba traditional leadership. Influenced by Afrocentrism, the http://www.umubemba.org website attempts to move away from European political terminology but remains caught up in the refrains of divine kingship. Chitimukulu is no longer ‘paramount chief’, or even king, but ‘Mwine Lubemba’, literally the owner of the land of the Bemba, but translated as ‘the supreme leader of the Bemba country’.Footnote 98 The history of the Bemba on the website, authored by the then Chief Mwamba (presently, the Chitimukulu), draws heavily on the colonial-era Africanist anthropologists.Footnote 99 Those closest to the Chitimukulu now form the Bemba Royal Establishment (BRE). Bemba kingship now resembles what Jean and John Comarroff identify as ‘ethnicity inc.’.Footnote 100 Ensconced in the historical imagination, the new rituals and narratives of divine kingship have come to orient people's sense of space and time along with modern nation's sense of historical identity.Footnote 101
Christian prophets, especially Pentecostals, have taken off from Lenshina, and now wield the greatest spiritual powers in their transnational movements. Yet the chief maintains invisible powers over aspects of statecraft, in particular when secular authorities interfere in succession. A decade after Michael Sata affirmed the authority of Chitimukuluship, as president of Zambia he challenged the succession process and refused to ratify the new Chitimukulu. According to many Bemba, this was the reason for Sata's sickness. Just before his death in 2014, he tried unsuccessfully to reconcile with the new Chitimukulu. One of the first acts of Sata's successor, President Edward Lungu, was to recognize the new Chitimukulu.Footnote 102
Even while Frazer's divine kingship is no longer fashionable, academic notions of spiritual power still remain an imaginative, sometimes self-serving, interpretation of African rituals, culture, and history. In art history and museum display Africa nostalgia has attained cosmopolitan finesse. The sentiment is linked to the contemporary imagination of an art world where the spiritual has come to substitute for a previous fascination with the primitive. The art of Luba power (or the power of Luba art) organizes museum displays and accompanying catalogs.Footnote 103 Consider the 2010 Sotheby presentation of the Master of Buli caryatid Luba stool (sold for US $7.1 million), which celebrates an aesthetics that represents kingship as ‘à la fois politique et spirituel’.Footnote 104 Displays of the French structuralist approach now appear, for example in the Musée du Quai Branly.Footnote 105
In the nostalgic era, the idea of divine kingship invokes contrasts between traditional pasts and a modern present. Central African sovereignties descend from the spiritual and moral heights of sacred kings to violent warlords and corrupt gatekeepers. African history can then revolve around the encounter of a vernacular tradition and an imposed modernity, the precolonial and the post (or neo) colonial, the rural and the urban, the sovereignty of the spirits and that of the state.Footnote 106 Frazer's teleology has cast a long shadow.
CONCLUSION
Divine kingship provided colonial-era anthropologists with a concept that placed the observed and rumored rituals of embodied powers into an analytical and comparative framework. This contributed to the impression of singular ‘tribes’ with particular political traditions framed in terms of a universal teleology. As tribalism's political and intellectual apparatus came up against the alternative sovereignties introduced by the prophets of a universal God and modernization, scholars provided a temporal framework for divine kingship. Drawing on oral traditions, historians viewed the rise of divine kingship as a stage in agrarian development and political centralization; the subsequent fall of the kings was an outcome of global trade and ultimately colonialism. This fall separated the spiritual from the bodies of kings, and culminated in secular rulers of states and religious prophets of movements. Divine kingship never died, however. Postcolonial exchanges between historians, anthropologists, art connoisseurs, tribal ethno-historians, and traditional rulers still resurrect it with nostalgic sentiments, a yearning for more spiritual and moral times, and an alternative to the disappointments of contemporary political sovereignties.
Despite divine kingship signifying an age of kingdoms distinct from colonial and postcolonial modernities, a determined anthropologist could identify it in the rituals and myths that surround present-day embodied powers.Footnote 107 Changes in regimes still ‘kill’ those rulers who no longer provide prosperity and thereby renew the legitimacy of government. The symbols of leadership have not been stripped of their invisible powers: moderns still find divinity in their prophets and politicians, in the gatekeepers of spirits and states who mediate international flows of prosperity. Instead of demonstrating the universal applicability of the model, however, such an analysis proves divine kingship to be so arbitrary, malleable, and historically contingent that in itself it signifies very little. ‘Despite the insistence of Frazer, Girard, De Heusch, and others’, Wyatt MacGaffey insists, ‘there is no objectively verifiable, unitary phenomenon to be called “divine kingship”.’Footnote 108 The use of divine kingship across the twentieth century, however, reveals a great deal about attempts to understand contested sovereignties. Awareness of the intellectual genealogy of this vocabulary of politics and belief might preface alternative historiographies.
